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The Carmakers And The TARP Deal
November 12: Will Paulson Spend The Full $700 billion TARP?
As the first tranche of the $700 billion is nearly gone, the Treasury will tell Congress that help to Detroit through the TARP program can only be given if Congress immediately and unconditionally hands over the full second tranche.
Today:
The conditionality of an auto bailout on releasing the second half of TARP is not made explicit, but that they are announced together is very suspicious:
Citing danger to the national economy, the Bush administration approved an emergency bailout of the U.S. auto industry Friday, offering $17.4 billion in rescue loans in exchange for deep concessions from the desperately troubled carmakers and their workers.
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At the same time, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Congress should release the second $350 billion from the financial rescue fund that it approved in October to bail out huge financial institutions.
Only yesterday the White House said it was considering bankruptcy for the automakers. That was certain to build pressure. Only three days ago Paulson said he will not ask for the second TARP tranche at all. Now he does. Now he knows he will get away with it.
I believe there is a deal behind this. Bush pressed Reid and Pelosi to not block TARP part II as a condition for a TARP loan to the automakers.
To formally get the second half of TARP Paulson needs to send a plan to Congress on how he wants to spend it. Congress then has 15 days to block the money. Bush could veto that block. Congress could override that veto.
But what if Reid and Pelosi do not call Congress back to Washington between Christmas and new years eve to stage a difficult fight to block the second $350 billion?
The second TARP tranche will sail through quietly. Congress will aprove it by not convening. And the automakers are safe for now.
It should be clear to everyone by now that this dreadful series of events and emergencies is riding on rails, is going according to plan.
The plan for America, all along, has been Banana Republic.
A nation of poorly educated renters and workers, ruled by their betters — the wealthy five percent who own everything worthwhile, control all the capital, rule over the government, dictate laws in their own favor, stack the courts with their own judges, and send out the police and nowadays the Marines and Army to enforce those laws, right down to kids with M16’s dressed in camo staffing DUI checkpoints along California highways.
The plan for America is the Five Percent Solution — move all money and power into higher, tighter, whiter, righter hands.
What the corporate state and the wealthy who own it need is economic cattle. They need renters, they need peons, they need blind believers, they need economic slaves. They are succeeding in their quest.
Peak Oil is upon us. Despite the current low prices caused by economic shock and awe, the price of oil will climb inexorably in the years ahead. Cheap energy is now an oxymoron. We will never pump more oil than we do right now, and the price of everything touched or served by oil will rise in the years ahead — yet every economy, company, and living human being on Earth still wants to grow, every coming year, from now on, forever.
We will borrow the entire wealth of the next two generations in order to try to re-inflate any kind of asset bubble and get the great casino rolling again, if only for a few more years. It won’t happen, because it cannot happen, because of the number one — one planet Earth to work with. It isn’t growing at 3% a year, so the global economy isn’t going to, either. It will be a struggle among several hundred local national economies to work out which one or two or three will grow 3% at the expense of all the others.
This is the moment when the American people need to pull all together to redefine and re-prioritize as a nation, need to move from planetary policeman to an energy independent nation that sees to its own people before its global empire. Our political class is still living in 1985, in the politics of divide and conquer, of carrot and stick.
They use corporate deregulation and self-regulation to rape the environment, despoiling the very air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat for the further profit of a few. That air, water, and soil will belong to your grandchildren, and we allow it to be permanently poisoned for the sake of a few corporations’ profits in one fiscal year. That fiscal year matters more than our grandchild’s health and happiness?
And we, the people, are to pay for it all, as with the Savings and Loan scandal, as with the Vietnam War, as with the Iraq War, as with the next war, and the next.
Making off with government pensions, corporate pensions and Social Security by bankrupting corporations, local governments and the Federal government itself is the plan.
Keep moving moolah to the top five percent of the population, the five percent who already own way over half the assets and capital of this nation. Go forth to tell the public to live in fear, tell the public they are being attacked from without and within, tell them outright lies, present them with a series of emergencies that no one could have seen coming. Just keep moving that moolah to the top five percent.
The Five Percent Solution is upon us, yet we sleep, eat, and work, and think it cannot happen here. We march to the nearest electronic voting machine now and then to cast our sacred vote into the whirlwind, never to be counted or to count again.
We cannot bring ourselves to believe that they are after our freedoms and funds and future — and after us. Not us. Not we, the people.
They’re politicians, leaders, learned and dedicated people. They’re not gangsters, thugs and thieves. Surely they do not mean us any real harm. Surely it cannot happen here. This isn’t Argentina.
Posted by: Antifa | Dec 20 2008 0:04 utc | 9
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